Effective contract management is essential for every company’s success. A meticulous approach not only helps ensure compliance with contract terms, internal policies, and regulatory requirements; it mitigates business risk and can even improve operational efficiency. When businesses rely on traditional manual methods or outdated software, however, the process can require a tremendous amount of staff time and be plagued by errors and missed opportunities.
The best contract management software includes robust, cutting-edge search and reporting features that make it easy for everyone in an organization to access the contract information they need when they need it. With customizable, search and reporting features, modern contract management software provides businesses with a whole new level of visibility into their contract data. As a result, these features have become indispensable tools in the effort to enhance and streamline contract management.
Today’s intelligent contract management software can conduct complex, powerful searches and create highly customizable reports. This can allow employees to search contracts using meta data like contract type, clauses, or renewal dates to pinpoint the information they need, allowing them to do their jobs more effectively while taking pressure off the company’s contract managers by eliminating time-consuming manual work. For example, negotiators can use these search and reporting features to ensure consistency and optimize contract terms.
The latest contract management software allows users to create contract management dashboards and reports that support the way they work. Below are eight examples of the types of reports businesses might use to improve compliance, sales, efficiency, and more.
Employees in a variety of departments, including sales, legal, procurement, and executives, benefit from specific views into contract status. For example, employees in sales and procurement can benefit from reports and notifications about contracts that are expiring or up for renewal. Employees tasked with fulfilling contractual obligations could perform more reliably with automatically generated reports and notifications regarding key dates, deadlines, deliverables, and milestones.
Sales, legal, contract management, and executives need to know when contracts are in process, who is accountable for the current stage of the process, and stay up to date as the process moves forward. Intelligent contract management software allows them to create the reports and alerts they need to speed contract creation, maintain version control, and manage risk.
Here is an example of our dashboard that highlights contract progress and status as well as key task and obligations.
Members of the sales team can optimize their efforts by creating reports that illuminate customer behaviors like renewals, upgrades, additional purchases, and referrals. This can help them better understand their customers so they can offer solutions and incentives that best meet their needs and preferences.
Procurement professionals could generate reports analyzing financial data such as pricing, discounts, and vendor performance to inform future negotiations and vendor selections. Such reports can help cut procurement costs, improve contract performance, and ensure both internal and external parties stay compliant with all contract terms.
Contract managers can customize reports to visualize workflows and identify bottlenecks. By tracking tasks throughout the contract lifecycle, they can gain insight into the sources of delays, eliminate redundancies, and minimize errors. With clear visibility into their chosen process KPIs, leaders can zero in on effective solutions for optimizing the contracting process. In addition, legal teams can be empowered to track datapoints that can improve contract and operational performance and document the value they deliver to the business. Below is an example our workflows and tasks report that highlights approvals and who needs to complete what to keep things moving forward.
Negotiators, executives, and sales team members can gain insight into the ROI of different types of contracts, pulling in data from diverse sources to account for variables like specific clauses, internal resources required, revenues, risks, and losses. Reports can highlight traits of top-performing contracts to guide negotiations, inform development strategies, and enhance revenue growth. For example, in our contract overview report below, you can see all of the details surrounding a contract such as amount, type, links to all documents and additional details such as contract duration, and expiration of various sub contracts.
In the competitive business landscape, it can be easy to get caught up in the numbers. However, business leaders understand the importance of holding true to their company’s mission and vision. Advanced analytics and reporting can tell users much more than how to cut costs and increase profits. They can also be used in a contract audit to highlight language that specifically furthers its mission as well as language that risks undermining it. In this way, leaders can guide the creation of future contracts toward greater mission alignment.
Similarly, a contract audit can identify language that poses a variety of risks to an organization. It can reveal, for example, fines, penalties, settlements, or legal awards paid in connection with various contracts and what triggered them. Once these risks are identified, it becomes simpler to mitigate them, saving the company money while supporting a positive brand identity. Modern contract management software can also help identify a company’s obligations across contracts and generate alerts and reports to keep all involved team members up to date and reduce the risk of breach.
Advanced search and reporting gives the legal team unparalleled insight into the content of all the company’s contracts. The once herculean task of ensuring consistency across contracts is streamlined and simplified with these tools. It allows users to extract clauses that meet defined criteria. From there, they can set up alerts, approvals, or escalations for specified clauses, create user-friendly templates for sales teams, and flag language that needs to be updated or phased out.
Metadata is a powerful component of contract lifecycle management and is the backbone of the reporting process. Advanced AI-powered metadata extraction tools automatically identify and extract key contract and compliance related data such as:
contract summary, risk summarization, counterparty, legal entity, contract record type, effective date, notice period, end of term date, governing law, payment terms and more.
This data allows the system to trigger alerts, reviews, or notification when action is required for data falling outside preferred standards. This reduces non-compliance risks, identifies potential contract risk factors, and enables proactive management and mitigation to safeguard contract integrity. Once metadata is extracted it can fuel a multitude of dynamic, real-time reporting such as:
Learn more about Contracts 365’s AI extraction companion and how to summarize key information from any type of contract you manage within Contracts 365.
Contracts 365 is contract management software that’s designed for Microsoft 365 users. Close integration with Microsoft 365 makes it easy to share data from apps like Dynamics 365, SharePoint, Salesforce, Outlook, Excel, Teams, and Planner. When information in your CRM, financial, and collaboration tools can be unified and leveraged for contract management, the benefits are profound.
Microsoft’s leading AI capabilities support Contract 365’s search and reporting features, creating a powerful solution for gaining unprecedented visibility into contract data. See our customer stories or request a demo, and we can show you our advanced search and reporting capabilities in real time.